Existentialism for airports

[sawyl]

I've recently tried to describe the strange feeling of disconnection from the world that I get whilst travelling. Having failed to come up with a convincing description of it myself, I thought I'd fall back on Camus:

The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it has become itself again. That stage-scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when, under the familiar face of woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not come. Just one thing: that denseness and strangeness of the world is absurd.

Serendipitously, I was reminded of The Myth of Sisyphus by Joss Whedon's commentary track for the deeply wonderful Objects in Space, the most existential of Firefly episodes.